With the cost of living crisis top of mind for us all – and even
coined ‘Cozzie Livs’ by one uni student on the NZ news last week – I thought it
would be an interesting exercise to do a comparison of some of our standard grocery shop items here in Rarotonga v one back in New Zealand. There are three supermarkets here
on the island, with the main one, CITC, also owning most of the petrol stations
here which stock a decent range of groceries 7 days a week (all but one of the
supermarkets is closed on a Sunday which takes getting used to). Supermarkets
are supplemented by locals selling their produce on the side of the road,
dotted around the island and at the main market on week days and especially on
a Saturday when the market’s in full swing.
We get most Countdown/Woolworths brand foods here, plus Pams
items. Often items won’t be in stock for weeks – like mealmate crackers, or the
Countdown brand butter, or chicken nuggets for a few weeks there (the kids
managed to survive). There’s no basmati rice on the island at the moment, which
is less troublesome than late last year when the island ran out of petrol, but
it’s still something to get used to. I’ve certainly become far more flexible
with what I’m aiming to buy and there is no point sticking to a meal plan. Sometimes
there are no apples or oranges aside from extremely expensive ones ($24kg
mandarins today for instance), but we can usually find apples, and always
bananas or tinned fruit. This means we tend to stock up on things when they are
in the supermarket and are glad for our chest freezer and good sized pantry to
let us do so.
When it comes to milk, we buy a carton of 12L of long-life
milk at $33, compared to $2.20 a litre for long life milk at Countdown. The
price of bread is regulated and there is only one provider of loaves of
sandwich-type bread. It all tastes bland but is passable for toast or a toasted
sandwich but is 1.5 times the price for similar bread at Countdown. The real
killer for us is the cost of butter which is currently $11.50 for 500g compared
to $6.50 in NZ. Perhaps we should become vegan?
Oddly, the price for 400g of dried apricots is pretty much
the same, at $12 in NZ compared with $12.30 here. It looks like mince is about
the same price too, and a 12 pack of Corona is $1 cheaper here.
The really big difference is the lack of range here. There
aren’t specials with brands competing against each other on price – the
selected is too limited. It’s interesting to compare that to the number of
special prices/discounts on my fake Countdown order. The main time there are specials
is for stock that’s expired or near expiry, and yep, we buy expired stock all
the time, especially if it can go in the freezer (we currently have 8 bags of 6
mini bagels at half price, $3.70, on special for school lunchboxes, and
chocolate chips for baking are often on special and live in our freezer). Nor
can you get a 3-for-the-price-of-2 deal, or things like baked beans in a three
pack. Often biscuits have had a rough ride on the boat to get here so are
crushed before they’re even open, so they get saved for baking.
Our diets are much simpler here, with far less variation.
Frozen chickens are always in stock so we have roast chicken on the bbq once or
twice a week, with local veggies (, cucumber, lettuce) topped up with imported
veggies like carrots, potatoes and capsicum ($10.50 a kg this week). If we’re
lucky, a friend’s avocado tree has just produced, or we spot someone selling
tomatoes on the side of the road, or we saw expired feta at the shop to jazz
things up, and we supplement with frozen veggies too. When in season, there are
plenty of fresh fruit around, with J a fan of starfruit especially, but none of
us that hot on pawpaw. We make our own easiyo which works out at half the price
of a kg of Fresh and Fruity or similar here, although J hates it and E isn’t a
massive fan so they don’t get yoghurt unless it’s in a smoothie. And as I’m not
working full time, I do much more baking for lunchboxes, although with the
price of butter I don’t think that makes financial sense some weeks tbh.
An interesting exercise to do, with the cost of my fake shop
here in Rarotonga coming in at $203.90 compared to the Countdown online order
at $162.95. A whole other framing for this is that the minimum wage here in the
Cook Islands is $9 compared to $22.70 in New Zealand, and Dean’s salary is half
what it was in NZ, but it’s too nuanced a comparison to capture fairly in a
blog post, so I won’t!
Instead, come visit, bring us groceries, and see for
yourself.
1 comment:
Very interesting! Don't worry well be visiting you little piece of Paradise again ...and looking to bring a bag with whatever groceries you would like...! :-)
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